My husband is on a 17-day holiday from his job. I fully expect one of us to kill the other before it's over, and your money should really be on me. I have trouble getting to sleep. He drops off like an old dog - I'm just saying.

In the meantime, things that are normally on a rather predictable schedule are going to hell. Like food. I am continuing to work while he is polishing up on his computer game-playing, football-watching skills. He deserves the break. He does. I'm just having trouble working up the energy to cook for a man, as I usually do, who is still in his underpants - and only his underpants - at two o'clock in the afternoon. This has, predictably, dissolved into a battle of wills.

The mutual battle plan seems to be figuring out who can go hungry the longest before the other breaks down and admits that food should be procured and cooked and concedes to perform the task. Sunday night I won. He cooked. This turned out to be a rather hollow victory.

The smell of burnt oil wafted into the bedroom where I was snuggled down in a nest of pillows gloating and reading Anarchy and Old Dogs*. I ignored this. Then there was the sound of scraping, the sort of metal-on-metal noise you might expect if you were trying to remove barnacles from the bottom of an aluminum bass boat with a pallet knife. I ignored this, too. Then came the sound of plates being removed from cupboards, and I got concerned. Enough time had not passed for the oil-burning, metal-scraping disaster to have been replaced with something edible. Benevolent disinterest was no longer a feasible strategy.

I emerged to find my once clean counter had become the final resting place for an alarming quantity of half-cooked batter and a wire cooling rack, upon which was what might have been waffles if you'd put them in your mouth and chewed for awhile first.

"That was the first batch," he said, as though that explained everything.

"Where's the second?" I asked.

He refused to answer.

"I used too much batter on those, so I used less the next time. The third batch is cooking, and you better hope they come out. I'm running out of ingredients."

There seemed to be more than enough batter on the counter for seven or eight more batches if we just scraped it all up. But he was looking a little shaky, so I kept that observation to myself.

The truth is with enough maple syrup, you can eat almost anything. This has now been proven. In the future, I'll be cracking first.


*This book by Colin Cotterill is the best book you're not reading right now. You should rectify that immediately. It's utterly and completely charming. The sort of charming that should get the author kissed by a lot of very pretty girls. When they're done with him, I'd happily give him a peck on the cheek myself.